This documentation was written to describe the 1.6.x series of
Subversion. If you are running a different version of Subversion,
you are strongly encouraged to visit http://www.svnbook.com/ and instead consult the version of this
documentation appropriate for your version of Subversion.

Name

Synopsis

Description

Dump the contents of the filesystem to stdout in a
“dump file” portable format, sending feedback
to stderr. Dump revisions
LOWER rev through
UPPER rev. If no revisions are
given, dump all revision trees. If only
LOWER is given, dump that one
revision tree. See the section called “Migrating Repository Data Elsewhere”
for a practical use.

By default, the Subversion dump stream contains a
single revision (the first revision in the requested
revision range) in which every file and directory in the
repository in that revision is presented as though that whole
tree was added at once, followed by other revisions (the
remainder of the revisions in the requested range), which
contain only the files and directories that were modified
in those revisions. For a modified file, the complete
full-text representation of its contents, as well as all of
its properties, are presented in the dump file; for a
directory, all of its properties are presented.

Two useful options modify the dump file
generator's behavior. The first is the
--incremental option, which simply causes
that first revision in the dump stream to contain only
the files and directories modified in that revision,
instead of being presented as the addition of a new tree,
and in exactly the same way that every other revision in
the dump file is presented. This is useful for generating
a relatively small dump file to be loaded into another
repository that already has the files and directories
that exist in the original repository.

The second useful option is --deltas.
This option causes svnadmin dump to,
instead of emitting full-text representations of file
contents and property lists, emit only deltas of those
items against their previous versions. This reduces (in
some cases, drastically) the size of the dump file that
svnadmin dump creates. There are, however,
disadvantages to using this option—deltified
dump files are more CPU-intensive to create, cannot be
operated on by svndumpfilter, and tend
not to compress as well as their nondeltified counterparts
when using third-party tools such as gzip
and bzip2.